www.affiliateconfession.com

Users of Build A Niche Store (BANS) got an exciting email a couple of days ago letting them know that version 3.0 will be going into beta testing by the middle of January and then it will be released shortly afterwards. This next release will feature some significant updates to further enhance your eBay affiliate business niche stores.

For those of you that have never read this blog, BANS is a script you install on your domain or sub-domain that allows you to create a fully functioning affiliate niche store from any eBay category in about 20 minutes. BANS is also the top tool I use to make money through the eBay affiliate program.

New features in BANS 3.0 will include:

Expanding BANS to include 14 countries eBay covers instead of just the 5 it covers now. You must sign up separately for each affiliate program under a different country covered by eBay.

You can include local auctions within a certain distance of any location chosen.

All links will now be more search engine friendly by being redirected through your site instead of linking directly to eBay. This is huge for SEO!

You can now include all products in a category instead of being limited to just 100. This translates to more pages for your site.

You will be able to better define items that appear in your auctions such as limiting the minimum number of bids, minimum item price and other variables.

Ability to turn specific store pages and content pages on and off.

Plus many more options such as customizing your template, product layout, turning on and off auction end times and the list just keeps going.

The great thing about BANS, besides being able to make some pretty good money from the eBay affiliate program, is that once you own it, you get all future updates for free. That’s correct, as long as they keep improving Build A Niche Store, you get all updates without ever having to pay another dime.

This is pretty exciting news for BANS owners and I’m personally looking forward to creating even more stores than the 7 I already have going.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.

Alan

Tags: build a niche store, bans, ebay affiliate, seo, auctions

Just wanted to wish all the readers of Affiliate Confession a very Merry Christmas and hope and pray you have a safe and joyous holiday with your family this year.

What are you reading this blog for? You should be spending time with your family. (I wrote this entry yesterday and time stamped it for today.)

Merry Christmas!

Alan

Tags: christmas, time stamp

I haven’t been keeping up with answering comments or responding to email much in the last few days as Jean and I took a much needed break and stayed at the Garden Cottage in Mt Dora, FL for a couple of days. However, I used the time stamp feature of Wordpress and wrote 3 posts ahead to cover for the time we were gone.

Affiliate Confession has now been blogged for more than 30 consecutive days and I’ve seen some pretty good results for the effort. Being that the 30 days ended right in the middle of the Christmas holidays there is probably a significant drop in traffic from people not being on their computers. (I shouldn’t be either) But there is now a very good base of posts, rss readers and links coming in to start off the New Year on a good pace.

During the last 30 days ending Dec 21st, Affiliate Confession has gone from 5 visitors a day to a high of 620 in a day and back down to 106 visitors on the last day of the 30 day effort on Friday, Dec 21st. The average per day over the entire 30 day period was 130 visitors. The most traffic came from StumbleUpon and the second most came from Entrecard. A total of 3,906 visitors came to Affiliate Confession during that time and visited 7,581 pages. The blog also gained a total of 45 rss readers, which I am vary thankful for those who have signed up.

I would consider this 30 writing challenge to be a success and although Affiliate Confession isn’t getting much traffic from Google, there is now a solid base of content for Google to index and rank and I’m expecting to see a big change in SE traffic in the month of January.

I want to personally thank each and every reader of this blog for taking the time out to read what I have to say. That’s a very humbling thing to think that readers are even looking to this blog at all for advice. I will try my best not do disappoint you.

Thanks again for reading and I hope you and your family have a very Merry Christmas!

Alan

Tags: blogging, entrecard, wordpress, stumbleupon, google

As the new year approaches it’s once again time to think about what you want to accomplish in this new 365 day period on the calendar. I like to set goals rather than make resolutions because resolutions usually revolve around stopping a bad habit vs getting something done.

But goals many times are very open ended such as wanting to make a certain amount of money in the next year, or wanting to be a more consistent blogger. Goals don’t really work unless they are more specific. Sure, you can want to make $25,000 per month, but how are you going to do that? What will you specifically do to make that a reality?

Making $300,000 in the next year is a great goal to have and breaking down that goal into doable actions, elements or smaller specific goals gives you a much better chance of seeing it to fruition.

I mention the ones above because they were my goals for this year (2007) and they were a bit too undefinable in the way that they would be accomplished. We were working on some specific things, but they really had no chance of creating that kind of income.

So with that to think about, what is your single biggest, most specific goal for affiliate marketing or blogging in this next year?

This year the one goal I’m looking at is to drive 1,000 people a day to eBay through their affiliate program and through Auction Ads. That will be accomplished by utilizing Build A Niche Store and various direct links through Auction Ads url tool. Right now I sending about 120 clicks a day to eBay, well short of the goal, so that’s quite a lot of work to do over the next year. That should equal about $6,500 per month just from eBay if my calculations based on the 120 per day extrapolated out are correct.

Care to share your biggest single goal for the next year?

Alan

Tags: goals, new years, affiliate marketing, blogging

No matter what kind of business you’re in, sometimes you must deal with people that just don’t get it. Yes, we all have those moments when we, you mean little old me, miss the most obvious. You know, it’s the looking for the ketchup in the fridge and not being able to find it, even when it’s right in front of your face and you have to look around it, to see where it’s not.

But then there’s another level that’s like those funny calls Dell tech support gets when someone mistakens their CD burner for a cup holder and calls Dell for help fixing it. I had one of those this week and you can’t do anything but just put it behind you and move on.

We sell a vegan meal planner on our healthy diet website that costs a mere $17.97 and is available as a, what else, digital download. You know, an ebook. Apparently there are some that don’t understand what an ebook is or either they don’t read the painfully obvious sales page that explains exactly what it is. And just in case you don’t understand what we’re selling on that page or would like to know more about what’s in the ebook, you can download a free sample copy that has the table of contents, introduction and table of more than 40 recipes.

Of the 3 people still left in the world that don’t know what an ebook is, I came across one a few days ago. They found the sales page, they downloaded the free sample ebook, they ordered the ebook and then they asked for a refund because they thought they were getting a book. They said they don’t like to read on the computer. I don’t like to read long documents on the computer either. I explained this to the customer in an email and said that they could do like I always do and print out the document for further reading. Then they wrote back and said they would just rather have their money back because they really wanted something they could write in.

Okay, at this point I am going to cheerfully refund the customer their $17.97 because it’s not worth it to explain that the whole concept of a meal planner that you can write in, as it states on the website by the way, is that you can print out the grocery lists, weekly planned meals and menus as many times as you wish. Last time I checked, that was what an ebook was all about.

Thus is another day in the life of an internet marketer. This is why affiliate programs are so appealing so many people, because you don’t have to deal with issues such as this. You refer traffic and get your commissions and someone else gets to explain what an ebook is.

See, blogging is easy, there’s always something to write about.

Alan

Tags: dell tech support, vegan, meal planner, affiliate programs, commissions